The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture

[kool maudit]

This is an interesting fragment. What a peculiar century was the twentieth.



The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture

http://commonedge.org/the-mental-dis...-architecture/

How did modern architecture happen? How did we evolve so quickly from architecture that had ornament and detail, to buildings that were often blank and devoid of detail? Why did the look and feel of buildings shift so dramatically in the early 20th century? History holds that modernism was the idealistic impulse that emerged out of the physical, moral and spiritual wreckage of the First World War. While there were other factors at work as well, this explanation, though undoubtedly true, tells an incomplete picture.

Recent advances in neuroscience point to another important factor: one reason modern architecture looked so different than past constructions was because its key 20th century founders literally didn’t see the world in a “typical” fashion. They couldn’t. Their brains had been either physically altered by the trauma of war or, like Le Corbusier, they had a genetic brain disorder. And while their recommendations for “good design”—a new world, a clean slate—certainly reflected their talent, ambition, and drive, their remedies also reflected their brains’ specific disorders.

In recent years, several authors and physicians have described the father of modernism, Le Corbusier (1887-1965), the Swiss-French architect, as autistic. Writers, such as the critic and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, and the biographer Nicholas Fox Weber, have come to the conclusion that the Swiss-French architect met the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They’ve chronicled his impaired social communications, repetitive behaviors, abnormal fixations (including a fascination with concrete), and apparent absence of interest in others.

“For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence,” Weber writes in Le Corbusier: A Life (Knopf 2008). “His fervent faith in his own way of seeing blinded him to the wish of people to retain what they most cherish (including traditional buildings) in their everyday lives.”